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It's not that easy!

The faithful blog readers would know I heart Japanese food. I would eat it everyday if it is not so darn expensive! The thought of making my sushi keeps popping up each and everytime I am eating at a Japanese restaurant. For example, "Aiyoh, why am I paying so much for something so easy as a sushi roll?? So easy, just cook sushi rice, put in some liao (fillings) on a nori sheet then roll lah!" or "Dang! This thing costs $XX??!! I can make it for 30%!" etc. You get the drift.

So anyhow, when I was grocery shopping (the supermarket is my good friend) the other day, I found myself picking up ingredients for sushi-making. Short grain (sushi) rice that is so darn expensive for that little pack, sushi su (vinegar), nori sheets, the artificially-pink-sweet-but-attractive fish floss, kanpyo (pickled gourd strips). I did not have to buy wasabi, something I already have in the fridge, and soy sauce, I would imagine it is a given in all Chinese households. Since then, they had just been sitting in the cabinet for a couple of weeks.

Luckily for the lazy and event-free Sunday evening, I decided to break the spell and got down to making a futomaki sushi dinner. But the lack of preparation meant I did not have the cucumbers I needed for my greens. Anyway, I used french beans :-)

Ta-ta!

They look appetizing, no? (be nice please!) This one you see here is my last (and best-looking) roll. You can probably imagine how the first few looked. Hehe.

Personally, I found the main challenge to be trying to gauge how much rice you need to spread out. Next would be the actual rolling, making sure the ingredients are tight and the rolls won't fall apart later.

Appetizing or not, they do taste pretty good. Although on hindsight, if I had trusted the recommended "dosage" of on the sushi su bottle, the rice would have been just that bit tastier! Oh well.

But after this virgin sushi-making experience, I do appreciate the value of eating at restaurants. The ingredients are not cheap so making your own would mean a lot of up-front capital investment. It is also certainly not easy to make decent sushi rolls as I found out. 1 hour of kitchen and labor time resulted only in a 10 minute eating time.

I still have enough ingredients for another bout of sushi-making when the opportunity comes along. But I think I will stick to paying a restaurant any other times.

Sushi is one of those things that look simple, but their very simplicity is what makes them so difficult to master. Sushi is highly unforgiving of mistakes. I know when I sit down at a sushi bar, I'm paying for the itamae's skill. I can't duplicate those flavors in my own kitchen, no matter how hard I try.

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"m-eats.com" is about a curated life of multiple roles, as a woman, Christian, foodie, marketer, traveler and treehugger. I hope the blog serves as a record of my journey through this temporal life and that on hindsight, I would see personal growth and realise that I am just human after all.